Communism, Socialism, and Christianity: One of These Does Not Belong

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Photo Credit: APOn Christianity, Socialism and Communism

By Rev. Marcel Guarnizo

February 5, 2014

There has been much discussion in recent weeks over the debt of Christianity to—and its compatibility with —the ideas and praxis of the socialist revolution, and even of communism. Many, even in the Catholic Church, believe that we share some of the ideals of the socialist revolution because it seems to them that communism, socialism and Christianity are for the poor. In addition to this most unfortunate error, the opposite fallacy has also been made popular in the minds of many, namely that capitalists and advocates of a free market economy, hate the poor.

But the historical record of communism tells an entirely different story. I have worked with the countries of the former Soviet Union for over 20 years, and I have seen what communism does to populations and nations. The scourge of the socialist revolution around the world gave us 6 million people killed by artificial famines in Ukraine and, as documented by The Black Book of Communism, 20 million victims in the U.S.S.R., 65 million in China, a million in Vietnam, 2 million in North Korea, another 2 million in Cambodia, a million more in the rest of Eastern Europe, 150,000 in Latin America, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan and through the international Communist movement and related parties about 100,000 more victims in various nations. This is a body count that reaches to 100 million victims worldwide.

Communism completely destroyed the economy, social fabric, and political culture of dozens of nations. It hollowed out the intelligentsia, ruined every economy where the seed of socialism fully “bloomed,” and abrogated fundamental rights and individual freedoms of the nations it subjugated. Clearly the Judeo-Christian commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” is not among the doctrinal teachings of communism and the socialist revolution. It is hard to believe that the socialist revolution—unlike Nazism—still finds promoters and defenders in the West.

The compatibility of Christianity and its legitimate concern for the poor owes nothing to the violent and inhuman regimes created by the socialist revolution. No system in human history has produced more poverty and misery than communism.

No greater foe has the Church ever encountered, than the communist revolution. During the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of religious and priests were sent to forced labor camps or simply executed. Five year plans to abolish religion were implemented and no true believer was ever safe in such nations. What social doctrine of the Church was ever derived from such madness? Communism and the socialist revolution are not only the antithesis of Christianity. They are also incompatible with free, just, and democratic societies.

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Obamacare Is Wayne’s World

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Photo Credit: YahooBy Lloyd Green.

Welcome to President Obama’s war on the work ethic. On Friday, the Department of Labor announced that workforce participation still hovered at a 35-year low, and that only 113,000 new jobs were added in January. Meanwhile, last Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that Obamacare would result in “a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024.” (PDF)

Significantly, the CBO did not point the finger at business for the anticipated drop. Instead, the CBO explained that the “estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor.” Great, so Wayne and Garth—the basement dwelling metal-heads first made famous on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, can keep on living with their parents for the rest of their lives.

Except, the White House and its friends don’t want you to think that it will be the young, fit, and fancy-free who will be the ones most likely to go on welfare—I mean Obamacare. No, instead they want you to believe that those who would work less are 55 year olds who would stay home to care for a sick parent, simultaneously embark on a second or third career, and become Pulitzer Prize-winning writers.

Just listen to White House Spokesman Jay Carney or to his de facto back-up Paul Krugman. According to Carney, “Because of this law, individuals will be empowered to make choices about their own lives and livelihoods, like retiring on time rather than working into their elderly years or choosing to spend more time with their families.” Earth to Jay, 28-year-olds without college degrees or technical training don’t have a whole lot of empowered choices to make.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesHealthCare.gov to be out of service

By Jonathan Easley.

HealthCare.gov will be out of service for two and a half days beginning on Feb. 15 — the last day people can sign up to obtain coverage that begins on March 1.

The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services announced in a blog post on Monday that the ObamaCare website would be lacking some enrollment functionalities so the Social Security Administration can conduct its annual systems maintenance activities.

The site will be out of order from 3 p.m. on Feb. 15 until 5 a.m. on Tuesday — a period that coincides with the long holiday weekend.

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The Tyranny of Winter: The Left is At War with Economic Reality

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Photo Credit: National Review The Left is at war with economic reality. The intellectual poverty of the Left — which is also a moral poverty — is evident in the fact that its leaders are much more intensely interested in incomes at the top than those at the bottom. Examples are not difficult to come by: Senator Elizabeth Warren is visibly agitated by Jamie Dimon’s recent raise, the AFL-CIO maintains a website dedicated to executive compensation, Barack Obama avows that “at a certain point, you’ve made enough money,” et cetera ad nauseam. The entire rhetoric of inequality is simply an excuse to rage about incomes at the top, a generation’s worth of progressive shenanigans having failed to do much about those at the bottom.

It is the case that incomes at the top have gone up while those in the middle and at the bottom have stagnated or declined in real terms. It is not the case that incomes at the top have gone up because those in the middle and at the bottom have stagnated or declined, nor is it the case that incomes in the middle and at the bottom have stagnated or declined because incomes at the top have gone up. There is a relationship between the two phenomena, but it is not the relationship that progressives imagine it to be.

Neither the American tax code nor other features of our economic policy are notably generous to high-income and high-wealth people by the standards of the developed world. American businesses labor under the highest business income-tax rate in the world and one of the business tax codes most riddled with political favoritism. At 40 percent — compared with an OECD average of 25 percent — our business income-tax rate is nearly double that of Sweden, and more than twice that of Switzerland, which does not tax capital gains. Our top personal income-tax rate is higher than that of New Zealand, which manages to finance an effective national government out of the proceeds, and much higher than that of very competitive countries such as Singapore. Taken together, our tax and entitlement systems are about as redistributive as typical European welfare states. What is unusual about the United States is not that the rich are taxed so lightly but that the middle class is taxed so lightly, at least relative to European practice.

Which is to say, those who endorse policies such as higher taxes on the wealthy as an antidote to income inequality are missing the picture. The American rich are not getting richer because of the American tax code. Income inequality in the United States is increasing. It is also increasing in Sweden. And Norway. And Finland. And the Netherlands. And Canada. And Germany. Pick your European welfare state and throw in Japan, too, and you’ll find much the same story.

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Obama Administration Undermining Key to America’s Unparalleled Success

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Photo Credit: NY Post Among its many stamps, the Postal Service has a series called “Made in America, Building a Nation.” The strip of “forever” stamps is a collection of iconic photographs of 20th-century industry featuring men and women toiling on railroads, skyscrapers and factory floors.

A celebration of work and workers, the series quotes Helen Keller saying, “The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”

My, oh, my, how times have changed. America now has a government that views work as a trap and celebrates those who escape it.

That is the upshot of last week’s remarkable exchange over ObamaCare. It began when the head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the interplay of taxes and subsidies in the law “creates a disincentive for people to work.” The report predicted the mix would lead to fewer hours worked, costing the equivalent of nearly 2.5 million jobs.

In response, President Obama’s spokesman pleaded guilty — with pride and pleasure.

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To Distance Themselves from Obama, 2016 Democrats Will Move To the Left

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Photo Credit: Cliff OwenThe 2016 Democratic presidential field is likely to run to the left of President Obama, partly because candidates will try to distance themselves from his political baggage while jockeying for an increasingly liberal base of voters, analysts predict.

Prospective candidates and their surrogates insist it’s too early to tell what kind of standing Mr. Obama will have with voters and whether he will be seen as damaged goods the way President Bush was for Republicans in 2008.

But discontent is brewing within the Democratic Party over what some see as Mr. Obama’s concessions to Republicans.

Those Democratic voters will be looking for candidates willing to slide further to the left, especially on economic issues.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that the next Democratic candidate is likely to be more populist than Obama has been. I think you might see [Hillary Rodham Clinton] move in that direction. I think you might see any major challenger to her move in that direction,” said Mike Lux, co-founder and CEO of the consulting firm Progressive Strategies who has worked on five presidential campaigns. “I think you will see that rumbling under the surface, that a Democrat is going to need to run a more populist campaign. I don’t think it will be an open, outright distancing from Obama, but just a much more populist version” of the Obama approach.

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Demonomics

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This week the big story was the tag end of the old JournoList gang trying to spin gold out of the dross of the Congressional Budget Report. The CBO report projected that by 2021 under ObamaCare more than 2 million full-time workers will find it financially advisable to quit work entirely or switch to part-time jobs in order to get more subsidies for healthcare insurance. To most of us who studied real economics or just paid attention to human nature, subsidizing indolence means you’ll get more of it.

But to the airheads on the left and their JournoList spinmasters — the very people who believed in their hearts that young, healthy workers would willingly pay more for their health insurance to subsidize older, sicker Americans and learned nothing from the failure of that prediction, this devastating CBO report spelled out a wonderful new world of possibilities for American workers at the bottom rungs.

1. Job Lock

Working their dreidels overtime, the gang argued that the CBO report was going to end job lock — long a Republican goal — but as “Ignatz” posted on Just One Minute: “I believe the Republican idea was to decouple insurance from employment, not decouple the employee from employment”

Nancy Pelosi, the JournoList band leader on this less-is-more score taunted: “The GOP seems to have forgotten that ending ‘job-lock; has been an avowed Republican goal for years — even a highlight in the Republican Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential race.” Her claim was a gross misrepresentation:

“Job-lock” itself is a different problem. Instead of effectively paying people to work less, as Obamacare does, conservative proposals would end federal preferences for employer-based insurance, allowing Americans to take insurance with them from job to job. People would not be stuck with a specific employer because they want to stay insured.

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Rand Paul Op-Ed: When Will Obama Start Caring?

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Photo Credit: APJust when you thought Obamacare couldn’t get any worse, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported on Tuesday that the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs will be lost due to Obamacare.

We can’t afford to lose any more jobs.

These numbers are calculated according to how many work hours the CBO estimates will be lost in the coming decade. Reuters reports, “In its latest U.S. fiscal outlook, the nonpartisan CBO said the health law would lead some workers, particularly those with lower incomes, to limit their hours to avoid losing federal subsidies that Obamacare provides to help pay for health insurance and other healthcare costs.”

Reuters continues, “Work hours would be reduced by the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs in 2024, said the agency, which earlier predicted 800,000 fewer full-time jobs by 2021. The bottom line would be a slower rate of growth for employment and compensation in the coming decade, according to the report.”

This is yet another example of the damage Obamacare has continued to inflict since its implementation.

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Should Conservatives Freak Out About Pot?

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Photo Credit: The Federalist “Wolf!” cried the young, foolish shepherd boy in the famous story. The first couple of times, there were no wolves. He just made it up. So people stopped paying attention and rallying to save the flock. When the wolves finally came, people no longer believed his cries. They just ignored him like the noise from an annoying, oversensitive car alarm. Consequently, the wolves descended. The boy’s sheep were slaughtered. In some versions of the story, he wound up on the dinner menu as well.

“Do not lie,” is the lesson moralists have wanted us to take from Aesop’s story, but there are other lessons. Do not let your imagination get the better of you, is one. Sometimes the wolves are real, is another. The boy and his sheep and the wolves are apropos because this is the first year of the legal sale of marijuana in these United States since 1937, in Colorado and my own Washington state.

And I fear that conservatives are reflexively crying “pot!” without thinking through what that might mean. Former George W. Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson wrote that the “freedom to destroy oneself with hard drugs” doesn’t just “degrade human nature but also damage[s] and undermine[s] families and communities and ultimately deprive[s] the nation of competent, self-governing citizens.”

That’s a debatable though entirely plausible point that ought to be taken seriously, but then he veered sharply into self-parody. Gerson went on to apply the warning to pot as well. “By what governing theory,” he asked, “did the citizens of Colorado — surveying the challenges of global economic competition, educational mediocrity and unhealthy lifestyles — decide that the answer is the proliferation of stoners?”

One might respond to his paean to technocratic managerialism by quoting from an obscure old stoner tract, drafted on hemp it turns out: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, man, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, so get off of my cloud.”

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Mr. President, Why Do You Oppose School Choice?

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Photo Credit: NewscomIn a largely unreported story, a couple in Pennsylvania is facing charges that could land them in jail for nearly seven years. Their crime? Sending their five year old daughter to a public school outside of their school district.

If it sounds bizarre, that’s because it is. And although breaking the law is never a good thing, the desperate wish of the Garcia family to send their children to a better school is playing out all across our country from sea to shining sea.

The fact is that millions of families have no choice when it comes to deciding on a school that best meets the educational needs of their children. If you are unfortunate enough to live in a school district with ineffective teachers and high crime and violence rates, you are often simply out of luck.

What makes this story from Pennsylvania especially representative of this terrible injustice is that a vast majority of those being deprived of a choice when it comes to education are Hispanic and African-American families. In too many states across the county, only wealthy families have the ability to decide for themselves where to send their children to school. For these families, they can choose to send their children to a better school without being constrained by where they live. Private school choice is a real possibility for these families.

Why not give this same freedom to other families?

This is the question that thousands of families have been asking in cities all across the country as part of the National School Choice Week shining a positive spotlight on the need for effective education options for all children. In rallies in city after city as part of a national whistle-stop tour, families have been joined by lawmakers, advocates and everyday Americans united by the common sense idea that every child should get the best possible education – whether it’s at a public, private, charter school, or through online learning or homeschooling.

And yet, this idea has powerful detractors who are more concerned about protecting the rights and interests of the adults in the system than the educational needs of millions upon millions of children stuck in underperforming schools. Among the fiercest opponents of school choice include the Obama Administration, which has tried to stop meaningful school choice options. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which has been serving as a lifeline for thousands of low-income families in our nation’s capital, is a prime example. It’s an effective program: 91 percent of students who used a scholarship to attend a private school of choice in DC graduate high school, and researchers Patrick Wolf and Michael McShane note that every dollar spent yields a $2.62 return on investment. Yet this Administration decided to side with the teachers’ unions and the powerful special interests by trying to eliminate funding for the OSP.

It’s not just choice in the nation’s capital. The Department of Justice spent much of last year suing the state of Louisiana’s school voucher program. Evidently, calls from grateful parents like Ms. Coretta Pittman, who praise the program for the ability to send their children to a safer school, fell on deaf ears at the Department of Justice and the White House.

For all of the President’s calls to increase opportunity in his latest State of the Union, this Administration’s own policies are hindering the ability for hundreds of thousands of students to succeed by attempting to limit their school choice options. Perhaps the President would care to know that in states that have expanded school choice measures, the racial achievement and attainment gaps have begun to narrow.

Until the President and this Administration embrace education reform policies like school choice, his rhetoric on freedom and opportunity will not match up with his actions.

Israel Ortega is the Strategic Initiatives Manager at The Heritage Foundation and the Editor of Libertad.org – The Foundation’s Spanish language website, www.libertad.org

This article appeared originally at Heritage.com and is re-published in full with the Heritage Foundation’s permission.

The Liberal Newcomers: Limit Immigration Or Watch Conservative Efforts Become Irrelevant

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Photo Credit: National Review People come to America because it is a remarkable oasis of freedom, prosperity, and opportunity. Conservatives recognize that the principal reason for our unique abundance is our constitutional restraint on the power of government. As Thomas Jefferson said, “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Maintaining this system requires the public to support limited government. In a new report, Eagle Forum details how immigration is fundamentally changing the electorate to one that is much more supportive of big government.

By itself, the annual flow of 1.1 million legal immigrants under the current system will create more than 5 million new potential voters by 2024 and more than 8 million by 2028. Congressional Budget Office projections indicate that under the Senate Gang of Eight’s S.744 bill, the total additional potential voters would rise to nearly 10 million by 2024 and 18 million by 2028. The influx of these new voters would reduce or eliminate Republicans’ ability to offer an alternative to big government, to increased government spending, to higher taxes, and to favorite liberal policies such as Obamacare and gun control.

There is nothing controversial about the report’s conclusion that both Hispanics and Asians, who account for about three-fourth of today’s immigrants, generally agree with the Democrats’ big-government agenda. It is for this reason that they vote two-to-one for Democrats.

The 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey found that 62 percent of immigrants prefer a single, government-run health-care system. The 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study found that 69 percent of immigrants support Obamacare. Pew also found that 53 percent of Hispanics have a negative view of capitalism, the highest of any group surveyed. This is even higher than the 47 percent among self-identified supporters of Occupy Wall Street.

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